URGENT: GW is crowdsourcing their FAQ on Facebook!

[Firefly]

Heh, I pointed it out to that guy, personally, that multiple individuals' scrutiny had effectively overcome the answer of, 'summoners can summon because.' I'm not against people pointing out RAW rulings to those who had misread, but the army of interpreters has been frustrating that thread.

I think summoning can have a happy marriage in the end:

1) Summoners can summon whatever they please if they have the keywords necessary, regardless of whether the unit is on the table.

2) Summon spell titles earn a colon after the word, 'Summon.' For example, 'Summon: Saurus Knights.' This designates 'Summon' itself as a spell, meaning that it may only be cast once per turn (unless otherwise stated).

3) Debatable: armies/models that 'need' summoning earn individualized exceptions based on the models being summoned.

4) Ridiculously powerful summoners (like Nagash) earn a keyword, 'Legendary,' which - due to the scale of their power - restricts that player from accessing the Sudden Death table.

I do hope it gets reined in somehow.

[Erik Setzer]

I think I saw that one - it was essentially 'agree with your opponent'

Which, outside of an official FAQ, I think is pretty reasonable.

Actually, that seems to be the official line on most of AoS. "We gave you very basic guidelines, you flesh out the game however you want." Which sounds nice and all, until you try to play a game at another store or another city, and they don't use the same house rules, making pick-up games even harder. It's a good way to isolate gaming communities, terrible approach to building a worldwide community. It's their attitude on things like that, that make me wonder if the few people left who understand the business they're in are locked in a basement somewhere not allowed to speak. I'll be amazed if the FAQ answers much.

I still expect it to be case of 'the unit must have been deployed at the start of the game'. Otherwise summoning gives certain armies a really big advantage others just can't match.

Not at all! See, you forget that in AoS, any army can include Necromancers or Chaos Wizards. So no army has an advantage over another. Just buy a Necromancer and some boxes of Undead and add them to your army. Doesn't matter what army it is. Problem solved!

Also, you're talking about "advantages" which sounds like a discussion of "balance" and I thought the general line was that "balance" is something only dirty tournament players talk about and AoS is great because it skips on the "balance" stuff and goes hardcore "narrative." If your opponent bought a lot more models, the rules fully support him throwing them all on the table and overwhelming you. Don't like it? Spend more money. Or try to take out the wizards first. But the official idea would be that you should totally spend more money.

Various models can summon to their heart's content in WFB and 40K. Why nip that here? Is it the lack of any other balancing mechanic, like points? Is it wrong in 40K for Chaos to be able to summon lots of new models to the table without fear of blowing up their psyker? There's no limit in 40K. AoS is actually more limited because you can only cast one or two spells a turn (has to be a major character to do more than that). So is 40K seriously broken due to summoning?